Dec 30, 2005

First interesting product I’ve seen: portable
fuel cells for
professional audio/video use. No prices given (of course), but
I’ll be watching this. I’m getting sick of dragging gel-cel batteries
everywhere I go and I’m on the lookout for alternatives.

I’ve found that NiMH/NiCad tech is just not reliable for high-capacity use, and solar
panels aren’t practical. LiON batteries have potential (and I’m ready to start
experimenting) but they’re expensive. Dare I hope that fuel cell technology
is the holy grail?

First, a comment about the community orchestra, conductor Marjorie Ness, and
soloists
Hyojin Kim (soprano), Betty Blume (alto), Jung Rae Kan (tenor) and John Whittlesey (bass): to
quote President Jed Bartlet, “These guys have some serious game.” Great jobs guys.

The layout of the performance was a bit interesting. The orchestra was
located in the church sanctuary, between the altar and the pews. The “choir”
was composed of amateur singers who sat in the first few pews. The microphones were
placed in the 2nd pew in the middle of the choir, about 7 feet
in the air. The sopranos and tenors
were located to the left (and behind) of the mics, and the altos and bass were
located to the right (and behind). The soloists stood about 10 feet away from
the first pew (~15ft from the mics), to the right of the mic position.

This would have been the perfect position for a surround recording.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know what the mic positioning world be before I
got to the church and I only brought enough equipment for a two-channel
measurement. I did use a Blumlein configuration so you might be able
to get a moderate surround effect through phase differences is you pump
the recording through a Dolby surround processor.

What did I learn this time? Pretty much the same things as
last time: 16 bits
just aren’t enough for live recording. I was also very happy with the microphone placement, putting
the mics in the choir helps create a sense of envelopment. One small issue was that one of the choir
singers (bass) was too close to the microphone – he tends to stand out in the recording,
and he frequently caused overloads in the recorder.

You can download a snippet from the recording
here. Other than the conversion
from WAV to MP3, I haven’t applied any processing to the file. The recording clips at a couple of points resulting in
some harshness (it’s not the fault of the MP3 conversion). Hopefully I can do something about that when I edit the final CD.

The Journal
Nature recently published an
editorial
calling for more sharing of scientific data over the internet:

A key technological shift that could change this is a move away from
centralized databases to what are known as ‘web services’. These are
published interfaces that serve to simplify access to data and software
(for an example of such services in action, see
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/xembl/index.html).
Until recently the preserve of expert programmers,
such interfaces now mean that anyone with even a basic
knowledge of programming can automate data
processing and analysis.

[…]

Scientists may be justified in retaining privileged access to
data that they have invested heavily in collecting, pending
publication — but there are also huge amounts of data that do
not need to be kept behind walls. And few organizations seem
to be aware that by making their data available under a
Creative Commons license,
they can stipulate both rights and credits for the reuse of data,
while allowing its uninterrupted access by machines.

I’ve been thinking along these lines (sharing data over the web using web services) for quite a while.
Of course the problem isn’t technological, it’s cultural:
we consultants go through a lot of trouble to collect and analyze acoustical data, and we’re not
eager to give it away for free. As an example of this attitude, look at Nick Miller’s experience:
his Noise-Con 2005 paper (A Pragmatic Re-Analysis of Sleep Disturbance Data)
looked at historical noise data from a new perspective. But, as he explained during his presentation, when he tried
to obtain data from other sources to supplement his analysis, he ran into resistance - other firms didn’t want to share
the data for essentially competitive reasons.

Now you could, I suppose, try to sell the data (assuming the data are yours to sell). An online database works
very well for a commercial model (and Creative Commons licenses are compatible with commercial models). But does
anyone want to buy this data?